by Terry Brooks
They were silent after that, lost in thought. The sun drifted west, the light faded to dusk, and the world slowed and stilled around them. The clouds that had begun to form earlier had massed and darkened further, and the first few drops of rain began to dampen their faces.
It was fully dark and raining hard when Tenerife reappeared. “They’re off,” he announced, giving Tasha a look.
“Then so are we.” The big man was on his feet at once. He turned to Xac Wen, who had scrambled up after him. “It might be better if you wait here.”
The boy was incensed. “I’m not waiting here! I did everything you asked of me, and I’m coming with you to see how this ends. You can’t stop me!”
Tenerife gave a short laugh. “Who would be foolish enough to try?”
Tasha bent close, his features taut and expressionless. “Listen to me, then. If you come, you can only watch. You can do nothing else. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“You will also have to keep to yourself everything you see. Maybe forever. That might be hard for a wild jaybird like you. Can you do it? Do you promise? No matter what?”
“I promise. Not a word.”
They set out at a trot, Tenerife leading the way. As they went, he quickly explained that he had kept watch on the palace near its rear entry until well after dark before seeing Isoeld surface from out of a small cottage at the rear of the grounds that he knew to be connected to the palace by an underground tunnel and through which Elven rulers had been slipping away to clandestine meetings since long before he was born. Teonette had been waiting just at the edge of the grounds, and together they had set out on foot traveling eastward.
“The rats flee the sinking ship,” Tasha observed. “Just as I thought they would.”
“They will have horses and a carriage waiting, but not until they are safely outside the city,” he finished.
“Then we can catch them before they escape,” Tasha responded, and picked up the pace.
They raced through the city in a line, Tenerife leading, Xac Wen trailing, down roads and pathways, through small stands of trees and between houses, three shadows lost in the darkness and the rain. At times, even Xac found it hard to tell where it was they were going, but Tenerife seemed completely certain and never hesitated.
“Stay well behind us and out of sight,” Tasha told Xac at one point. “Don’t let her see you. We don’t want her to know that you’re with us.”
Xac Wen wasn’t entirely certain what they intended to do, but he understood well enough that the Queen would recognize him if he showed himself and the brothers didn’t want that.
Damp all the way through and winded when they finally slowed, the boy peered through the gloom and mist at the eastern edge of the city amid scattered woods and tall grasses to watch the distant flicker of a light bobbing and swaying not too far ahead. Tenerife turned and pointed, nodding back at his brother and Xac, and all three dropped into a crouch as they continued forward. The boy knew how to move without making noise much better than most, a street kid of his own choosing for most of his life, his home life untroubled but boring when compared with the adventure he had always found in the larger world. So he kept pace with the Orullians and did so silently, hanging back so as not to be in the way, watching the figures ahead grow steadily larger and more distinct until at last he could see their faces.
Isoeld Severine and Teonette.
They were following a narrow path, each of them carrying a bundle, wrapped in heavy-weather cloaks with hoods pulled up so that the only view he had of their faces was when they looked back now and then and the light caught their features. It was clear they had a destination in mind and were hurrying to reach it. Xac guessed the news had unsettled them enough that they had decided to get away before Phryne arrived to confront them. Given that the Princess knew the truth about them and now possessed the magic of the Elfstones, neither Queen nor first minister saw much future in Arborlon. Better to slip away and start over somewhere else in the valley—a self-imposed exile that would not be challenged once they were gone.
Of course, they wouldn’t be traveling without something to trade for what they needed. What would they have taken that would be valuable enough to give them the means to attempt a fresh start?
The boy couldn’t think of anything, and in any event there was no further time to consider the matter. The pair had reached the carriage that Tasha had foreseen they would have arranged, a team of horses already hitched in place and a minder waiting. A few words were exchanged, and the minder took something from Teonette and disappeared into the night. The first minister watched him go, then opened the carriage door and helped the Queen inside. As she glanced back once, Xac Wen saw her face clearly. Even at his young age and with his limited experience, he thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
“Now,” Tenerife said to his brother.
They sprang to their feet and sprinted for the carriage, tearing through the thin screen of trees and breaking out into the open not fifty feet from the carriage. Teonette saw them coming and vaulted into the driver’s seat, a more agile man than Xac would have believed, given his size. But Tenerife was quicker and caught hold of the reins on the lead horses, swinging the team about to prevent it from bolting. Tasha was a few steps behind, and he gained the first step of the carriage just as Isoeld bolted out the door on the other side and began to run.
For a moment everything was swallowed in rain, darkness, and confusion. Xac did as he had been told and stayed well back from where the struggle was taking place around the carriage. But he saw everything that happened. Teonette had produced a short sword and was hacking down at Tasha. Tenerife was still struggling with the traces and the team, trying to hold them in place. But he lost his grip and was thrown down, and the team bolted ahead with Teonette still in the driver’s seat urging them on. Tasha hung on to the carriage for a few seconds longer and then let go, staggering ahead for a few steps before dropping on all fours, muddied and soaked.
The carriage thundered through the darkness and disappeared from view, the first minister urging it on.
Tenerife ran past his brother to give chase, but Tasha called out sharply, “Let him go! The Queen is the one we want!”
Tenerife drew up and turned back, panting. “You’re right. We can find him anytime.”
The brothers trudged back to where Xac Wen waited. Without being asked, the boy pointed in the direction he had seen Isoeld Severine go. “Good eyes, eagle boy,” Tenerife said, giving him a grin.
They began tracking the Queen. It wasn’t all that difficult. She was leaving a trail so easy to follow that even the darkness and rain failed to mask it. Even Xac was able to pick it out with no trouble. Tenerife led once more, and the three picked their way ahead through the trees at a steady pace, watching for any sign of their quarry. Her cloak was found discarded a hundred yards off, apparently too cumbersome for her to be bothered with. A scarf was discovered farther on, then the bundle she had been carrying.
They hurried ahead, slowly closing the gap between themselves and their quarry. After thirty minutes of hard pursuit, they caught up to her. By then, she had run herself out and was collapsed on the ground beneath a towering hickory, her clothes muddied and torn, her face twisted in fury.
“You have no right to treat me so!” she spat at them.
“We have every right,” Tenerife replied. “We are here at the command of the Princess. She insists you be present when she arrives.”
“I don’t answer to her! She isn’t anything to me!”
“So it would appear, given your efforts to have her imprisoned and killed.” Tasha gave her a smile. “Do you think she doesn’t intend to see you pay for your treachery? What will you tell the members of the High Council when she confronts you with the truth? Do you think your lies will count for anything then? She’s a hero now, Isoeld. She saved the Elven nation with her acts of courage at Aphalion Pass.”
Hiding back in the trees, rema
ining perfectly still, Xac Wen could still see clearly the look of mingled fury and despair on the Queen’s face.
“I will deny everything! No one will challenge me!”
Tasha shrugged. “Perhaps. We’re going to find out, at any rate. Too bad your first minister won’t be there to support you in your efforts. I’ve never seen anyone run away so fast.”
He reached for her arm, but she jerked away quickly, her haunted eyes shifting this way and that. “Teonette is a coward. If not for me, he would have crawled back to the High Council begging for mercy long ago. Let him go. I didn’t need him then, and I don’t need him now.”
“You can tell all that to the High Council when we bring you before them,” Tenerife said brightly. “It should be interesting to see their reaction.”
She sneered at him. “You are such a fool. You and your brother both. You think this matter all done and over already, don’t you? The little Princess returns, the conquering heroine, and the evil Queen is deposed and sent into exile. So simple. Except that isn’t how it’s going to happen. The Princess will make her case, but I will make mine, as well. She is young and wild and often confused—everyone knows that. I’ll convince the High Council that she misread what she heard and saw. I was there, but it was an assassin that killed the King. I was trying to save him, and I did manage to save her. But she was so out of her mind with grief that she had to be restrained and locked away for her own protection.”
Tasha and Tenerife exchanged a quick glance.
“It won’t work,” the former declared. “They won’t believe you.”
“No? Why don’t we find out? Take me back and let me face them. Running away was never a good idea in the first place. Teonette’s solution—a coward’s way. In fact, he forced me to go with him. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t. The assassin was his doing, not mine. I discovered it only tonight. He admitted it. He wanted me for himself. He’s always wanted me.”
“You had nothing to do with the killing? Is that what you plan to say?”
“Of course! Look at me! Do I appear dangerous to you? Do you think the High Council will see me as dangerous? Or as a beautiful woman coveted and manipulated by strong men!”
The brothers stared at her in silence. She looked from one to the other, and then walked right up to Tasha and cupped his face in her hands. “You can’t win this, Tasha. Not this way. But there is another. You could support me. You could tell them that what I say is the truth. If you did that, I would make you my new first minister. And your brother could have a place on the High Council, too. There’s no reason you shouldn’t both be there to help me govern as Queen. We share the same concerns; we both want to see things set right. Phryne is young and untrained; she needs time to grow and mature. When I am gone, she can be Queen after me. There’s plenty of time yet for her. We can make her understand.”
She was touching his face all over. “In the meantime, you can hunt down Teonette and silence him! We both want to see him punished. We could share so much, you and I.”
Her voice was seductive and compelling, and she stroked the big man’s arms and shoulders, casting glances at Tenerife as she did so, commanding attention as only beautiful women can, demanding they consider what in a different time and place they never would.
Tasha nodded slowly. “We could do that. Couldn’t we, Tenerife?”
“We could,” his brother agreed.
“Be your consorts together?” Tasha pressed. “Act as your protectors and advisers?”
“All of that! Anything you want!”
Xac Wen, still in hiding, was so horrified at what was happening that for a moment he almost left his hiding place to try to stop it.
Tasha was caressing Isoeld in response to her advances. “You are a beautiful creature, Isoeld,” he told her. “What man wouldn’t want to do what you asked of him?”
“Only a fool,” Tenerife said.
Tasha placed his hands on either side of her face and drew her to him. “But then we’ve never been particularly bright,” he whispered.
Then he tightened his grip, wrenched her head sharply to one side, and broke her neck.
ON THE DAY PANTERRA QU HAD CHOSEN FOR HIS departure, almost a month after his battle with the demon at Declan Reach, Prue Liss walked to the edge of the village with him to say good-bye. Aislinne Kray went with them, mostly because she wanted to say good-bye, too, but also to make sure Prue was able to return home safely. By now, Prue had learned to make her way about the village unaided, able to find her way from Aislinne’s home, where she was living and studying, to visit with her parents and others and to run small errands. Every day she became more capable, less hindered by her blindness. Her instincts, still strong in spite of the death of the scarlet dove, seemed to provide her with a fresh way of seeing things; much of the time it was as if she could actually see with her other senses. Aislinne was teaching her to become self-reliant, working with her on counting steps and marking obstacles, tracking her movements to familiar places until she was able to go to them alone.
“Gray out here today,” Pan said to her. He was holding her hand as if they were children again. He was not guiding her; he knew better than to do that. She thought that mostly he just wanted to be close to her until it was time. “Rain clouds everywhere.”
She could smell the air, damp and metallic. For some, it might seem a reflection of the dark mood of the people of the valley, almost all of whom had found their lives upended in one way or another since the Drouj invasion had been turned back. Even in the farthest corners south, where no hint of the danger had manifested itself and life had gone on pretty much as always during the time of the threat, the confidence and certainty of earlier times had evaporated. No longer could anyone afford to feel safe behind the protective walls that had offered sanctuary for so long. No longer could they rely on the valley to protect them. Those days were gone forever, and no one knew what life would be like in the aftermath.
Nor were the peoples of the valley united in even the smallest of ways now that both the Elves and the people of Glensk Wood had been left to defend the valley on their own. None of the resident Trolls or Spiders had come forward to help. None of the other villages or towns or city fortresses south had chosen to stand with them. Not even Hadrian Esselline, after making his vaunted promises of assistance personally to Sider Ament, had materialized. In the end, no one had come, and those who had been betrayed were not about to forget it.
This had more than a little to do with Panterra’s leaving, Prue believed, although he would never admit it to her.
“You understand why I’m doing this, don’t you?” he asked her suddenly, as if reading her mind. “Why I’m going?”
“I do,” she assured him.
“I don’t want to leave you,” he added. An uncomfortable silence settled in place between then. He squeezed her hand gently. “If there were another way, I wouldn’t.”
She looked up at him with her milky eyes and smiled. “Stop apologizing, Pan. You don’t have to keep reassuring me about this. I know I can’t go with you. Not like this. You can’t be out there worrying about me. You have to do this without me, and I am at peace with that.”
“I just feel bad about it.”
She would have felt bad, as well, in other circumstances. Terrible, in fact, if not for what she had been told by the King of the Silver River. If Pan survived his battle with the demon hunting him, his destiny was to guide the people of the valley to a new safehold in a new country in much the same way as their ancestors were guided here five hundred years earlier. She believed it was so, and if it were to happen Pan must return from his search. It might take him months, but eventually he would come back. When he did, he would take her with him to wherever he was going. She was certain that was how it would happen.
“Where are we meeting them?” Aislinne asked suddenly, walking a discreet distance behind the couple.
The Orullians. They were coming down out of Arborlon to make the journey wit
h Pan. It had been their idea, in fact. With the people of the valley now fully aware of the dangers lurking without and splintered in ways that might never be repaired, thoughts had turned anew to striking out for distant territories. The Elves had always wanted to go, foremost of all the races to wander and resettle, and now they had both their incentive and their chance.
Tasha and Tenerife had made the decision weeks ago, not long after Phryne’s death. With the old order wiped out, the Amarantynes forever gone, they had little connection to those who now struggled to determine how the new order would be shaped. Better to be elsewhere while things were being sorted out, Tasha argued. To be among the first to find another place where those who might be dissatisfied with life in the valley could resettle, Tenerife added.
They had asked Panterra to come with them, and he had agreed.
Prue wasn’t entirely sure why. It might have been for much the same reasons that the Orullians were leaving. Or perhaps he already had an inkling that the best use of his newly established responsibility as a bearer of the black staff meant discovering what was out there instead of trying to imitate his predecessors. Whatever his thinking, he was unwittingly fulfilling the destiny that the King of the Silver River had said would be his.
They reached the western edge of the village, and as they did so Tasha and Tenerife stepped out of the trees. “Late again,” the former chided Pan. “You’ll have to do better if you intend to travel with us.”
They hugged, all of them sharing a warm greeting, even Aislinne, and then stood awkwardly, looking for a way to avoid what was coming next.
“You look well enough for someone who fought and killed a demon,” Tenerife observed, mostly to Pan, but taking in Prue and Aislinne with a sideways glance.
“We’re hardy folk down here in the valley,” Pan replied. “Are you both healed, as well?”
The brothers shared a shrug and an exchange of glances. “Mostly. On the outside, at least. I think we’re still a little bruised in here.” Tenerife touched his heart. “When we think of Phryne.”
